December: Wiggy Festwochen Date

From Diciembre Rob wants to see great performances while in Vienna. He's not content to attend the fluffy tourist concerts being hawked by men in Mozart coats. But he tries hard to find things I can understand too. Consequently we have seen some interesting, but offbeat things. In 2005 we saw something called "Amnesia de Fugar" (Amnesia of Migration?) for which the audience had to be at least bilingual. It was a play in Spanish and Hindi being simultaneously translated into German (the Spanish) and English (the Hindi). It was fantastic.
Last night's language was theoretically simpler: Chileans speaking Spanish with German supertitles. It was a dystopian play with three actors set in 2014 with a Chile who is at war with Peru and Bolivia. A soldier, Jorge, is at home visiting his two sisters, Trinidad and Paula. Trinidad is a hippie pacifist and Paula is a warmonger. Family dysfunction reigns. At various points both sisters are so mad that they rip off their wigs.
The acting was incredible. Each person came on at one point as another character and they were phenomenal. But more amazing was their ability to talk for about five minutes straight. Neither Rob nor I could keep up with everything that happened in the last 20 minutes because it was so rapid fire that I couldn't keep up and the supertitles just kept flashing on by. We tried to piece some of it together afterward. It was the last of our Festwochen tickets this year and we're sorry to see them go -- we were just commenting that we've never seen a bad performance with them; plenty of things that went way over our heads, but always an amazing event.
Then we walked back through the city (no strollers! no whining!) a new way and went to the Grieschenbeisl. This is one of the oldest establishments in Vienna, and Will and I found it on one of our walks in 2002, but I'd never been there to eat. I thought we didn't have time, it being already 10pm, but Rob asked the host if we could just come in for a 'Moor and his Shirt', and we were seated and had it in front of us within 5 minutes. I guess you know how to run a restaurant when you've been in business over half a millenium. There was barrel vaulting. There was accordion playing. There was a large man making ribald comments about the items on the menu ("Bavarians!" cried Rob like a true Berliner). It was a pretty fabulous example of Moor and His Shirt -- a little more modern presentation with the cream on the side, a little crunchy even around the edges. A little darker chocolate sauce. Very satisfying.
One of our students is on Strudelquest 2009, to find the most amazing, most affordable apple strudel. I'm definitely more in search of the end-all and be-all of Mohr im Hemd.

Comments

Curtis said…
I've never heard of Moor im Hemd. It's now on my list. And the sugar-free kick will be out the window.
5:22 PM
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